I used to listen to the Dennis Prager show all the time, and my favorite hour was the male-female hour, which is the second hour every Wednesday. In that hour, you will hear some of the most frank discussion of male and female issues. In a recent male-female hour, a 50-year old woman called in to give advice to younger women.

Prager explains in National Review:

Every Wednesday, the second hour of my national radio show is the “Male/Female Hour.” A few weeks ago, a woman named Jennifer called in. For reasons of space, I have somewhat shortened her comments. Every young woman should read them. This is precisely what she said:

Dennis, I want to get right to it. I’m 50 years old with four college degrees. I was raised by a feminist mother with no father in the home. My mother told me get an education to the maximum level so that you can get out in the world, make a lot of money. And that’s the path I followed. I make adequate money. I don’t make a ton of money. But I do make enough to support my own household.

I want to tell women in their 20s: Do not follow the path that I followed. You are leading yourself to a life of loneliness. All of your friends will be getting married and having children, and you’re working to compete in the world, and what you’re doing is competing with men. Men don’t like competitors. Men want a partner. It took me until my late 40s to realize this.

And by the time you have your own household with all your own bills, you can’t get off that track, because now you’ve got to make the money to pay your bills. It’s hard to find a partner in your late 40s to date because you also start losing self-confidence about your looks, your body. It’s not the same as it was in your 20s. You try to do what you can to make your life fulfilling. I have cats and dogs. But it’s lonely when you see your friends having children, going on vacations, planning the lives of their children, and you don’t do anything at night but come home to your cats and dogs. I don’t want other women to do what I have done.

How did this happen to her?

Somebody asked me the other day, “Why did you stay single and never have kids?” There’s answers: Because I was brainwashed by my mother into this. But it’s hard and it’s shameful to tell people, “I don’t know. I ran out of time.”

There’s not a good answer for it except “I was programmed to get into the workforce, compete with men and make money.” Supposedly, that would be a fulfilling life. But I was told that by a feminist mother who was divorced, who hated her husband — my father.

She tried to steer me on what she thought was the right path, but feminism is a lie. That’s what I want women to know.

I didn’t realize this until late in life. I want to tell women: Find someone in your 20s. That’s when you’re still very cute. That’s when you’re still amiable to working out problems with someone. It’s harder in your 50s, when you’ve lived alone, to compromise with someone, to have someone in your home and every little thing about them annoys you because you’re so used to being alone. It’s hard to undo that, so don’t do what I did. Find someone in your 20s.

Now I have a lot I want to say about this column, but I really liked what Robert Stacy McCain said in his post.

He wrote:

There is an entire category of self-help books by Christian women whose devotion to “traditional family values” somehow never resulted in them walking down the aisle, and so they write about the “godly single” life and offer relationship advice (which would seem to be the blind leading the blind, so to speak). [Older traditional conservative unmarried women] often blame men for their failure, complaining that men need to “man up.” The more likely explanation, of course, is that these women actually had matrimonial opportunities in their youth, but just didn’t play their cards right and, rather than confess their errors — “Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea máxima culpa” — instead rationalize their failure by scapegoating men.

I don’t want young women to be wasting their teens and 20s like this woman is, choosing men for relationships using criteria that have nothing at all to do with marriage, or what a man does in a marriage:

I would advise young, unmarried women today not to indulge in drunkenness and promiscuity in their late teens and 20s. We know from studies that virgin brides make for a more stable and happier marriage. Given the divorce laws, and the high number of divorces for unhappiness, it makes sense to be a virgin and choose a virgin to marry. I think young women should focus their energy on relationships with men who don’t want sex before marriage, but would prefer to commit and start a family. Although these men may not be “attractive” according to superficial criteria, they should be selected because they are good at marriage, and want to marry sooner, rather than later.

On the other hand, I would advise successful man to choose a woman who is attracted to his abilities as a husband and father. Choose a woman who respects your ability to be serious, to be self-controlled, to be focused on serving others, and to achieve what you set out to achieve. Men need respect more than they need oxygen. In order to get that respect, a man has to choose a woman who has, from earliest times, preferred men who have good moral character, demonstrated leadership ability, and a proven record of achieving what he set out to achieve by wise decision-making.

Where are all the good women?

Captain Capitalism says that although successful men would like to have a wife and children, they are not finding any women who are qualified to be wives and mothers.

He writes:

It is a very REAL fact men are facing today when it comes to marriage – that the only younger women out there to date and potentially marry up are all brainwashed, leftist, NPC women.  They ALL vote democrat.  They ALL are feminists.  They ALL put their career above everything else.  They ALL have crippling debts.  They ALL have dubious careers.  And to any man who takes having a wife and forming a family seriously, these women are simply unqualified for the job.  This isn’t to say literally “all” women are like this (there are engineers, accountants, and traditional women), but the statistics are so skewed, so bad, there is effectively no choice for most men today.

There’s a wonderful opportunity here for Christian women to distinguish themselves from women who aren’t making good decisions about men and marriage.

For example, I think it’s a good idea for women to have a worldview that is pro-marriage. I even wrote a post about that, with 10 questions to evaluate whether you have a marriage-friendly worldview.

It’s also a good idea for young Christian women to prepare to how to discuss their faith intelligently with a man. I put together a helpful list of 10 questions that a woman who is serious about her Christian faith should be able to answer.

Ideally, it would be common for Christian women to understand how to discuss their faith in a reasoned way with non-Christians, using scientific and historical evidence. That will prepare her to evaluate a man’s spiritual leadership ability, and to answer the questions that serious Christian men will ask her to see if she is ready for marriage. Men ask these questions because we think about choosing someone who has an authentic faith in order to raise our children. The idea of putting an informed Christian woman in the mother role excites us. Note: men know that debt-free wives can have children sooner, and that means we will get more children. If you want to get married, and have lots of children, then choose a STEM degree, so you can get out of debt quickly with only a few years of work.

Christian women should be more serious about preparing for marriage, and choosing marriage-minded men, than this lady:

There’s no question today that women have the intelligence and ability to succeed in careers. We should be teaching them to apply their intelligence and ability to understanding how to prepare for marriage. They should understand when men want to marry and why men want to marry, and then govern their own decisions and priorities so that they achieve the goal of getting married. Not every man is marriage-ready and commitment-focused. But if women are serious about marriage, then they should choose to get into relationships ONLY with those men who are serious about marriage. They shouldn’t choose to waste their best years on fun with men who don’t want to commit to them.